Updated December 21, 2021 4.2k votes 819 voters 35.3k views
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Vote up all the trivia you're eager to share with friends.
A little knowledge is supposed to be a dangerous thing. But if "little knowledge" refers to trivia, it sure can be fun - especially when you have little-known facts to brag about.
Our planet is full of amazing humans, animals, plants, and snack foods. So here are some facts about all those things that may shock or amuse you, and surely make you want to share them with someone else.
Magnolia Trees Evolved Before Bees And Are Pollinated By Beetles
Magnolia trees have been around since the Cretaceous period, meaning dinosaurs were around to appreciate their beautiful blooms. But bees were not, because they came later in the evolution flowchart. So how did magnolia trees achieve the pollination that allowed them to survive and flourish 95 million years later?
The answer is beetles. When a foraging beetle comes bearing pollen, the flower closes its petals (actually, tepals) around the insect and traps it. Fresh pollen covers the beetle, and it's free to pollinate another flower.
You've probably never looked deep into a goat's eyes - but if you did, you'd likely notice the animal has rectangular pupils, placed horizontally. According to scientists, many herbivores have this trait because it gives them a wider field of vision. As they stoop down to chomp grass, they can watch out for enemies.
Grazing animals like goats can also swivel their eyes by more than 50 degrees per eye to look out for what's lurking around or behind them. This eye rotation is 10 times more than what the human eye is capable of.
Turritopsis dohrnii is a species of jellyfish first discovered in the 1880s in the Mediterranean Sea. Like all jellyfish, it has a normal life cycle. The planula (jellyfish larva) develops from a fertilized egg and settles on the seafloor to grow a colony of tubular polyps. The polyps release free-swimming medusae, or what we call jellyfish. These tiny jellyfish are smaller than the nail on a human pinkie finger, and have bright red stomachs with 90 or more tentacles.
If these creatures are injured, they revert back to the polyp stage and give rise to more jellyfish, a process called transdifferentiation. The creatures have thus been dubbed "immortal jellyfish."
Technically, Mercury Is The Closest Neighbor Of Every Other Planet In Our Solar System
Our planet, solar system, and the Milky Way galaxy are constantly on the move in space. While you've probably learned that the Earth's closest neighboring planet is Venus, it's not as simple as drawing an interplanetary line between the two.
Consider as well the orbits of planets and the law of averages. In relation to each other, planets spend a good portion of their time on opposite sides of the sun. Because of this, on average, Earth's closest neighbor is Mercury. In fact, mercury is the closest neighboring planet to every other planet in our solar system.
Most bags of snack chips contain air, but not the atmospheric air we breathe, which is a mixture of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and small amounts of argon, carbon dioxide, and other gases. A bag of chips actually contains nitrogen, used to preserve the taste, freshness, and flavor of your favorite snacks.
According to one experiment that tested 14 brands of chips, a bag of Fritos had the least percentage of air (19%), while a bag of Cheetos had the most (59%). The average percentage in all chips tested was 43%.
